IP Scanner for Mac: See Every Device on Your Network

If you're on a Mac and want to know what's on your network, the choice used to be a command line tool or an app that hasn't been updated in years. DeviceShelf is a native Mac app. In this video we'll go through it with a focus on what's different on macOS: the permissions, the menu bar, Apple devices and Wi-Fi.

What you see is the demo network, a made-up home with forty-four devices. Your own network will look the same, with your own devices.

Click Scan. The first time, macOS asks whether DeviceShelf may find devices on your local network. Allow it: without that permission, macOS hides the network from the app and the list stays empty. After that, every device that answers appears within seconds.

You get each device with its address, hardware address, vendor and type, and on top the totals: devices online, kinds of devices, open ports and the average response time.

Apple devices are a special case. They all share the vendor Apple, and a modern iPhone hides its real hardware address. What helps is Bonjour: Macs, iPhones, Apple TVs and HomePods announce themselves on the network with a name and the services they offer. DeviceShelf listens for that.

Open the Apple TV, and under Security you see the services it announces, like AirPlay. That's how DeviceShelf tells an Apple TV from a MacBook, even though both just say Apple.

A word on iPhones and iPads: they join each Wi-Fi with a private address instead of their real hardware address. DeviceShelf marks those addresses and recognizes the device by its name instead. Give it a name in its details, and it stays the same device even when the address changes.

Open Network. Here you see which Wi-Fi this Mac is on, the channel, the band and the signal strength. Since macOS 14, Apple only reveals the Wi-Fi name to apps with the location permission. DeviceShelf asks for it for that reason only. It never stores or sends a location.

Below, Nearby Wi-Fi lists the networks in range with channel and signal, so you can see if your neighbours crowd the same channel.

Every macOS permission DeviceShelf can ask for is listed under Settings, General, with what it's for and how to take it back. Location for the Wi-Fi name. Microphone and speech recognition for dictation. Notifications for alerts. All of them are optional: the app works without them.

Right above it, the privacy section. DeviceShelf collects no data: no telemetry, no analytics, no account. Your scan results stay on your Mac. Data only leaves it when you use a feature that needs it, like the AI assistant with a cloud provider you chose.

DeviceShelf can live in the menu bar. Choose Dock and menu bar, menu bar only, or Dock only. The menu bar icon shows how many devices were found and how old the last scan is. Closing the window keeps it running in the background, and with Start at login it's there after every restart. That's what you want if it should alert you about new devices.

Live bandwidth per device needs to watch network traffic, and macOS only allows that with administrator rights. Instead of running the whole app as administrator, DeviceShelf installs a small signed helper once. Click Set up BPF access and enter your password. In System Settings the helper shows up as DeviceShelf-Helper, and Remove BPF access takes it away again.

Then switch on live capture, and you see which device is using the connection right now.

If you have a Mac mini or another computer that's always on, DeviceShelf also comes as a server edition. It runs without a window, keeps watching around the clock, and you open its dashboard in the browser. Under Remote servers, this app connects to it, so the laptop shows what the server saw while the laptop was asleep.

One more Mac detail in the AI Cockpit: the microphone button. You can ask your question out loud, and macOS turns your speech into text right on the Mac, without sending the recording anywhere.

The assistant is optional, works with a provider of your choice or a local model on your own Mac, and answers questions about your network in plain language.

So: on the Mac, allow local network access on the first scan, and location if you want to see the Wi-Fi name. Bonjour tells your Apple devices apart. Keep DeviceShelf in the menu bar so it can watch, and set up the helper once for live bandwidth. There's also an iPhone app for scanning on the go.

More videos on finding devices, bandwidth and security are on our channel. DeviceShelf runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, at deviceshelf dot app.